sun

On Monday, August 21, there will be a total solar eclipse visible in a band across the entire contiguous United States. The last time that happened was in June of 1918. In fact, the last time a total solar eclipse was visible anywhere at all in the continental U.S. was in 1979. So, this is a big deal for American eclipse watchers and millions of us will be heading for some part of the 65-mile-wide band of totality that wends its way from Oregon to South Carolina.

The world’s largest floating solar power plant is now operational and connected to the electric grid in China. It is a 40-megawatt facility and floats in water 13 to 30 feet deep in a lake that was created by a former mining operation.

The amount of solar energy striking the surface of the earth in two hours is enough to supply all of humankind’s needs for an entire year. For this reason, it is widely thought that solar energy should be our primary source of electricity. If this is to happen, however, there must be cost-effective ways to obtain solar electricity regardless of the time of day, weather, or seasonal changes. Essentially, there must be ways to store the energy from the sun to use it when we need it.

Renewable energy may be under attack by the federal government these days, but one federal agency is making great progress on using the sun’s energy to split hydrogen from water. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, located in Golden, Colorado, recently highlighted two initiatives aimed at the production of renewable hydrogen.

Capturing carbon dioxide instead of releasing it into the atmosphere is a way we can use fossil fuels without it having harmful effects on the climate. Energy storage is a way to address the volatility of clean energy sources like wind and solar power. Excess energy stored during peak production can be used when production ceases, such as when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing.

For more than a century, a wide stretch of land north of Kimberley, British Columbia, was used for intensive industrial hard-rock mining. The site of Teck’s Sullivan Mine hosted a steel mill, a fertilizer plant and tailings ponds and was rendered treeless.

The North-Rhine Westphalia region of Germany was the crucible of that country’s industrial revolution and it still generates a third of Germany’s power, much of it using aging coal plants. However, Germany’s national energy transition program is pushing the country away from coal and other fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources.

Santa Claus may have to change out of that heavy red suit this Christmas. The North Pole, site of his fabled workshop, is seeing historically high temperatures this year. In fact, it is 36 degrees Fahrenheit higher than it has been in past decades. This is a staggering number.

When we think about the visual impact of energy plants, we usually envision ugly smokestacks belching out toxic fumes. Of course, many people also consider wind turbines to be eyesores and even solar panels are often viewed unfavorably from an aesthetic point of view.

There are both big ideas and small ideas for generating electricity from renewable sources. For example, even though there are now gigantic solar energy farms producing vast amounts of electricity, there are also plans to embed solar technology in the windows of homes and businesses to capture even more of the sun’s energy.

When looking at the best ways to meet humanity’s energy needs, there is little doubt that the sun is the ultimate answer. In one hour, the Earth receives enough energy from the sun to meet all of our needs for a year. Despite this fact, the world currently only gets about 1% of its energy directly from the sun.

The biggest challenge facing both solar and wind power sources is that they don’t produce power around the clock; they only work when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. As a result, they don’t quite measure up to the requirement for power on demand.

Installing solar arrays on the surface of bodies of water is an idea that is catching on around the world. Such installations are especially attractive in places like Japan, where land resources are scarce. In the UK, there are a couple of these so-called “floatovoltaic” projects underway – one outside of London and one near Manchester.

The Las Vegas Strip has been referred to as an energy consumption nightmare. Just one look at the place provides evidence for the claim: an endless sea of lights, glitz and glamour and cavernous casinos running huge banks of air conditioning equipment in the desert heat. Even with Boulder Dam a hop, skip and jump away, Vegas is struggling to meet its electricity needs.

The first solar roadway in the US will be installed this year at the Historic Route 66 welcome center in Conway, Missouri. The installation will use hexagonal solar panels developed by Idaho-based start-up company Solar Roadways. The initial trial installation will use the panels to cover a sidewalk in the Route 66 center rest area and will only cover a few hundred square feet. The modular building blocks are hexagonal panels of a little less than 5 square feet in area that each generate 48 watts of electrical power.

Coral reefs are great tourist attractions. Nearly a million species of fish, invertebrates and algae live in these biodiversity hotspots and they generate billions of dollars yearly from the tourism industry.

The U.S. recently celebrated the milestone of having one million solar installations nationwide. It took 40 years to get there, but experts believe the next million could take only a couple of years. The solar revolution is clearly well underway.

California leads the nation in the use of solar energy with well over half the country’s solar electric capacity. The state is the home of several of the largest thermal solar generating plants in the world and between those and multiple utility-scale photovoltaic plants, California utilities get more than 5% of their power from the sun.